How Much Does a Business Website Cost?

Website pricing feels murky because most of the industry keeps it that way — "contact us for a quote" on every page, then a number that seems to depend on the weather. Our approach is different: our starting prices are published in our service catalog, and this guide uses those real numbers throughout. Where your project might land above a starting price, we'll tell you exactly what pushes it there. Every dollar figure below is one of our published starting prices; we haven't invented any "industry average" numbers, because we can't verify anyone's prices but our own.

The short answer

A range exists because scope varies — a landing page and a 15-page custom build are different jobs. But a range with real numbers beats a shrug, so here are our published starting prices for the most common website projects:

"Starting at" means exactly that: the price for the scope as described in our catalog. Add scope — more pages, integrations, e-commerce — and the price grows with it, in writing, before work starts. Other shops will have other numbers, some lower, some higher; the point of publishing ours is that you have at least one real anchor while you shop.

What's included at each level

The 5-page starter ($997, our published starting price) is the workhorse: Home, About, Services, Gallery, Contact. Mobile-optimized, fast-loading, with an SEO foundation — titles, descriptions, and structure that let Google understand the site. It's built for the business that needs to look professional, be findable, and turn visitors into phone calls. What it doesn't include is deep customization: the layout follows proven patterns rather than being designed from a blank canvas.

The custom build (from $2,497) is a different kind of project. Ten or more pages, designed from scratch for your brand rather than adapted from a pattern — custom UI, animations, and lead capture wired into the site rather than bolted on. The extra money buys design time (concepts, revisions, decisions made for your business specifically) and room for the features a five-page brochure doesn't have. Choose it when the website is doing heavier lifting: competitive markets, multiple service lines, or a brand where looking like everyone else costs you jobs.

The lead capture funnel (from $697) isn't a smaller website — it's a different tool: one page, one goal, built to convert ad traffic into booked appointments, with the form delivering straight into a CRM. Businesses often run one alongside a main site.

The costs people forget

The build price is the number everyone negotiates; these are the numbers that actually surprise people later:

• Domain name. Your web address renews every year, forever. It's a small cost, but it must be paid — and paid by an account you control, because a lapsed domain takes the whole site (and your email) down with it.
• Hosting. A website is files on a computer that must run all day, every day. Someone charges for that. Our managed hosting starts at $47/mo (published price) and includes SSL, CDN, daily backups, and uptime monitoring — but whoever hosts you, the line item exists.
• Maintenance. Software rots quietly: security patches, plugin updates, content that goes stale. Our maintenance plan starts at $197/mo (published price). Skipping maintenance is a legitimate choice for a simple static site — but it's a choice, and it should be made on purpose.
• Content and photos. The site needs words and images. If you supply them, budget your own time — it's usually more than people expect. If you don't, copywriting and photography become line items. This is the most common cause of stalled website projects: the design is done and the "About" page says "coming soon" for a year.
• Email. you@yourbusiness.com usually runs on a separate service with its own monthly fee. It's not automatically included with a website, and assuming it is causes exactly the kind of launch-week scramble you'd expect.

DIY builders vs. freelancer vs. studio

Honest trade-offs, since we're an interested party and you should discount our take accordingly:

DIY builders (Wix, Squarespace, and similar) have the lowest sticker price, and for some businesses they're genuinely the right call. The real cost is your time: learning the tool, fighting the template, writing the copy, and being your own support department — hours that come out of evenings or out of running the business. The result also tends to look like the template it came from. If your time is cheap right now and the bar is "exist online," DIY is defensible. If your time is your most expensive resource, do that math first.

Freelancers range from excellent to vanished, and the price varies as much as the reliability. The good ones are often the best value in the market. The risk isn't talent — it's continuity: one person is a single point of failure for your website's future. If you hire a freelancer (plenty of people happily do), the questions later in this guide matter double, especially about ownership and what happens after launch.

A studio like us costs more than DIY and prices in the same territory as experienced freelancers. What you're paying for is accountability with a structure behind it: published prices, a written scope, someone to call who is still in business next year, and a team rather than a person. Whether that's worth it depends on how much the website matters to your revenue — for a business that gets its work from referrals, maybe not; for one where the website is the front door, usually yes.

What makes a website cost more

When a project lands above a starting price, it's almost always one of these, and a good quote will name which:

• Bookings and CRM integrations. Online scheduling with confirmations and reminders is its own build — our booking page with calendar integration is a published add-on starting at $397. Wiring forms into a CRM with automated follow-up is likewise real work beyond the page itself.
• Page count. Every page needs layout, content, and upkeep. Ten service-area pages aren't one page ten times, but they aren't free either.
• E-commerce. Products, carts, payments, taxes, shipping rules — a store is software wearing a website's clothes, and it's priced like software.
• Custom features. Calculators, quote builders, customer portals, member logins — anything interactive beyond forms moves the project toward development work.
• Copywriting. If nobody on your side is writing the words, someone on ours is, and that's a scoped line item rather than a hidden markup.

What you should get at any price

Whatever you pay and whoever you hire, some things are not premium features. Treat this as a floor:

• Mobile usability. Most local-business visitors arrive on phones. A site that only works on desktop isn't discounted — it's broken.
• Speed. Pages should load fast on a cellular connection, not just office Wi-Fi. (We learned this on our own homepage the hard way — that story is in our performance case study.)
• Basic SEO foundations. Proper titles and descriptions, one clear heading structure, and pages Google can crawl. Not a "package upgrade" — table stakes, and part of how we approach web design at every price point.
• Ownership of your domain and files. The domain registered in your name, and the site files available to you if you ever leave. Any arrangement where leaving your developer means losing your website is a lease dressed up as a purchase.

If a quote at any price doesn't clearly include all four, the quote is incomplete, not cheap.

Ongoing costs, honestly

A website's total cost is the build plus the years that follow, so here are our published ongoing numbers plainly: managed hosting from $47/mo, and the maintenance plan from $197/mo (updates, content changes, performance monitoring, security patching, priority support). Hosting is close to non-negotiable — the site has to live somewhere. Maintenance is a real decision: a simple site that never changes can run for a long time on hosting alone, while a site you update often, or that runs plugins and integrations, will eventually cost more in emergencies than the plan costs in prevention. The honest framing isn't "you must buy maintenance" — it's "know which kind of site you have, and decide accordingly."

How to compare quotes

Quotes from different shops usually describe different projects, which makes the cheapest number an illusion. Force them onto the same scope and the comparison becomes real. For each quote, get answers to the same list:

• How many pages, listed by name?
• Is the design custom or template-based? (Both are legitimate — but they aren't the same product.)
• Who writes the copy? Who supplies the photos?
• Are mobile usability, speed, and basic SEO foundations included?
• What integrations are included — forms, booking, CRM, anything else?
• What are hosting and maintenance per month, and are they required?
• Do I own the domain and files if we part ways?
• How many revision rounds are included, and what do extras cost?

Lay three quotes against those eight questions and the real differences surface fast — usually in copywriting, integrations, and what happens after launch. That's the comparison worth making, and we're happy to be one of the columns: our numbers are on our pricing page and in the catalog, same as you've seen here.